Taking your current mortgage with you is possible on most mortgages these days. This process is of ‘porting a mortgage’ is ideal if you are in the middle of a fixed rate deal and decide you want to move and keep the mortgage deal you have.
Not all mortgages are however portable though, so you should check with your Lender or Broker before putting your house on the market to clarify. If you have an older mortgage or if it is with a specialist lender there is a chance it might not be portable.
Whether you port your mortgage depends on a number of factors. If you’re not tied in to your current mortgage deal with early repayment charges it could be better to look around at alternative deals that are available.
Some customers decide not to affect the porting option even when it is available to them. There are several potential reasons for this. Maybe the new Lender will not lend them the extra money they need to fulfil the move. When you port a mortgage there is a restriction in that it is on possible to port the amount currently owed. Any additional borrowing needs to be from the deals currently available from the lender’s range and might not be competitive.
If you do port a mortgage and borrow extra monies, the additional borrowing creates something called a “sub-account”. In other words, you have one mortgage but with two different rates of interest applying to it. This can be a real pain because almost certainly the two products will “overlap” each other and as such it’s difficult to get these to line up without having to let one drift onto the standard variable rate for a while. Customers tend not to like having to change their mortgage deals as often as this and some of them decide to take the “hit” and pay an early repayment penalty to swap Lender and get it all lined up.
Porting a mortgage is more difficult than it sounds sometimes and you would be wise to enlist the help of a local Mortgage Broker for their opinion on the options.